Mercury, also known as Archer McLean's Mercury, has been relaunched by publishers Ignition Entertainment, at the cheaper price of $19.99 (RRP). Never heard of Mercury? Here's what it's all about:

Mercury is a challenging puzzle game that puts you in control of ultra-realistic liquid mercury ‘blob’. The trick is to effectively guide the mercury blob around traps, door switches, spikes, zapping electrical fields, moving floors and other hazardous elements, rolling your way through 72 levels spread over six challenging worlds. Blob control is important! Keep your liquid mercury intact is the key to completing your goal as well as identifying the colors you need to win the game.

This relaunch at a cheaper price could be related to the hype of Ignition Entertainment's upcoming release, Mercury Meltdown. A relaunch at $19.99 reminds me of the platinum series of PS2 games. Maybe other game publishers will take note, and do the same with some of their outdated titles. We could even see a fully-fledged PSP platinum games series soon!

Source: IGN

If you're passing through Narita in transit one day and you find yourself in the mood for a PSP game, be careful. You might see this on a storeshelf and think to yourself, "Hg: Hydrium? Is that some new, radical PSP game?" Then, you'll end up buying it and realize that you've just bought yourself a whole lot of Suigin (that's the Japanese word for Mercury).

That's right, Ignition's Awesome-developed Mercury has been renamed Hg: Hydrium for its Japanese release. It's also being published under the Sony Computer Entertainment brand. This seems to suggest that Sony's is coming to the realization that people actually want games for their PSP.

Hg: Hydrium will see Japanese release on 8/4/2005.